Imagine you're a shipwrecked sailor adrift in the enormous Pacific. You can choose one of three directions and save yourself and your shipmates -- but each choice comes with a fearful consequence too. How do you choose? In telling the story of the whaleship Essex, novelist Karen Thompson Walker shows how fear propels imagination, as it forces us to imagine the possible futures and how to cope with them.

To capture attention amid the endless feed of quizzes and cat memes, we need to come up with a variety of stories that connect with our audience and do more than just tell our founding or 'I quit my job' story.

Cathryn Wellner's insight:

The tips are basic (and important) enough to tuck into your mind and pull out whenever you are communicating with potential customers.

This SlideShare is packed with information that answers all of these questions. It tells a great story about their story. Tips are included at the end for how you can craft stories for your business success.

I blog often – and the world is in enthusiastic agreement – about the need to tell stories to get attention and be remembered. And I often talk about the five fundamental stories: the Quest that Hollywood knows so well, and the four others that are just as fundamental to [...]

I opened the classroom door to hear a robust Irish voice shouting to the children: What are you doing in here? I never heard such a hullabaloo in me life! The children all sat down immediately and put their toes together under their desks. I heard the voice continuing, "I come from the country called Ireland, and I am visiting your country to find out whether American children learn anything at all!"

The perfect storm of crises we now face may well prove to be the challenge that drives us into our greatest evolutionary leap. Ecology cannot be made subservient to economy if we want to continue our life on Earth as a healthy, embedded global human society. In this thought-provoking article, evolution biologist Elisabet Sahtouris explores the way of Ecosophy - "the human household in which economy (including finance) and ecology are not separated because they are understood as aspects of a single living system, or living economy, that is both organized and governed wisely.

Dave Isay opened the first StoryCorps booth in New York’s Grand Central Terminal in 2003 with the intention of creating a quiet place where a person could honor someone who mattered to them by listening to their story. Since then, StoryCorps has evolved into the single largest collection of human voices ever recorded. Isay is the 2015 TED Prize winner, with an award of $1 million to fulfill a wish: to grow this digital archive of the collective wisdom of humanity. Listen to Isay's vision to take StoryCorps global — and how you can be a part of it by interviewing someone with the StoryCorps app.

Cathryn Wellner's insight:

There's no a StoryCorps app for devices - lots of good questions to ask, ideas for capturing stories. Worth downloading and giving a try.

"Here we’d like to share a few of our favorite books. Some of these were written just for filmmakers, helping us understand how each technical decision affects our stories. Others take a more general approach, examining how human beings are wired to respond to narrative, and how you can craft your stories to better engage your audience."

Read the full article to find out more about why these 7 books that will help you to tell better stories:

The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan GottschallStory: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKeeWired For Story by Lisa CronContagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah BergerMade to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan HeathThe Filmmaker's Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide for the Digital Age by Steven AscherThe $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau

If you want to separate your content from your competitors, storytelling is a great tactic to add to your content marketing strategy. Several interesting case studies have shown how the implementation of storytelling can triple sales within one year. The best part is that any business can use storytelling in their content marketing strategy by following these five best practices.

What a great article! Thanks to fellow curator Gregg Morris @Gregg Morris for finding and sharing it.

Here's what I like: the case studies and proof the author, Jasmine Henry, uses to back up her points. Gotta love that. No wild speculation here -- just solid material on how storytelling has produced results for real companies, and why.

The tips given are also right on. Go read the article, grab the examples, and follow Henry's advice. It's a great way to start off the week and the month of February!

Scientists have produced the first integrated computational model of reading, identifying which parts of the brain are responsible for such sub-processes as parsing sentences, determining the meaning of words and understanding relationships between characters. They based their results on brain scan of people reading a Harry Potter book.

Cathryn Wellner's insight:

Brain research is fascinating to me - even the whole idea that we can puzzle out what is happening in our mysterious head mass

The International Storytelling Center is dedicated to inspiring and empowering people everywhere to capture and tell their stories, listen to the stories of others, and use storytelling to produce positive change.

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